This blog discusses the historical reliability of the Bible, the creation/evolution debate and apologetics in general.

Sunday, 14 April 2013

“Adam and Eve - The Greatest Fairy Tale of All”?

There are no valid scientific grounds for rejecting the historicity of the first humans.

Joel Kontinen

Sceptics tend to have interesting views on Genesis. They often read the text from an evolutionary perspective. Recently, novelist Charlotte Pickering asked:

“Why does the story of Adam and Eve still resonate in our cultural consciousness, given that anyone with the most basic grasp of science can demolish the idea that life began in the manner Genesis describes? Evolution can be seen occurring in fruit fly in school lab dishes. GP's are refusing to prescribe antibiotics because over-prescription means that bacteria will evolve to become resistant.”

This statement is teeming with factual errors. I happen to know several biologists with earned PhD degrees who believe that there is no conflict between true science and the Genesis account of origins. Their research has certainly involved more than just “the most basic grasp of science”.

Origin of life research has not been able to produce a single plausible explanation of how life could have arisen from non-life. Atheists badly need a miracle but they do not accept a miracle-maker. According to the naturalistic myth, stardust eventually turns into people but no one knows why.

Most popular news headlines of evolution in action do not really have anything to do with Darwinian evolution. Fruit flies have been studied for a period that corresponds to one million years of human evolution and yet they have not changed at all.

Research has shown that bacteria were resistant to antibiotics even before the discovery of penicillin some 70 years ago. A paper published in the journal Nature in 2011 stated: “antibiotic resistance is a natural phenomenon that predates the modern selective pressure of clinical antibiotic use.”

Ignoring the enormous difficulties in a non-theistic origin of life, Ms. Pickering goes on to claim:

“To the sceptics, creationism, with its talking snakes, angels and tyrant god, belongs with Hogwarts, tarot cards and astral projections, in the world of esotericism. The intellectual tide turned decidedly against it in 1859, with Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. In the years that have followed, this tide has reached tsunami proportions, largely thanks to neo-Darwinist popular science gurus such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay-Gould. Any bubbles of hope for biblical literalism that do occasionally rise in the primordial soup of our education system are immediately burst.”

This is not an accurate description of the God of the Bible, who is a good God. Moreover, whereas Scripture is anchored in history, new age beliefs are not.

The tide has definitely turned against Darwinism, because it lacks a mechanism for turning an amoeba into an astrophysicist. Old Darwinian truths, such as junk-DNA, have been discarded. Current discoveries about the complexity of life are a convincing case against Darwin’s outdated idea.

However, it seems that some die-hard evolutionists have missed the boat.